A suspected developer from the crypto mixer Tornado Cash was arrested on the 12th of August over allegations that the protocol facilitated money laundering and he should be held liable.
- The #FreeAlex initiative aims to raise awareness about his arrest in the hopes to free him, as the protestors claim that his arrest threatens to “kill the entire open-source software segment,” as “no one will dare to write and publish open-source code, no one will invest in the segment if they could be made responsible for the use of the tool they created by other parties.”
- A crypto mixer is a protocol that pools tokens from various addresses together and then distributes them back to users for the same amount they put in. But after being pooled, the tokens become extremely difficult to track – which is why they’ve been used by criminals for money laundering and illicit transactions.
- The code used to facilitate the protocol is all open-source though, which is where the petition comes in. 1inch Network claims that “developers have no control whatsoever over how their code is subsequently used,” and “this could be the beginning of arrests of open-source developers because code might be used for illegal purposes.”
- The Change.org petition currently has over 2,276 signatures.
See Related: War On Code – Tornado Cash Developer Alexey Pertsev Arrested
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